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Product Description

Send A Flamingo Small 2 by Amy Van Gilder

Mixed Media, 12″ x 9″

Current Exhibition at Flower Pepper Gallery: Wild Heart from February 4th – March 6th, 2017

Previous Exhibitions at Flower Pepper Gallery:
- Mini Tale from November 19th to December 8th, 2016
- I Wish I Had Friends Like That! curated by Amy Van Gilder from October 15th to November 15th, 2016
- Special Window Installations for Flower Pepper Gallery
- Flower Pepper Box – Small Box
- Cash And Carry

Artist Biography:
Puppetmaker and designer Amy Van Gilder’s career spans five decades. She was one of the earliest designers in the New York Muppet Workshop, hired in 1976 during the first season of The Muppet Show. She worked alongside Jim Henson in Elstree Studios, England, heading up the Muppet Workshop during the filming of The Muppet Show. She created puppets for iconic episodes including those featuring Diana Ross, Christopher Reeve and Dudley Moore, and was nominated, alongside other members of the team, for two Emmy Awards and won a Peabody Award. Van Gilder also worked as a puppet maker and designer on The Dark Crystal, The Muppets Go Hollywood, The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Labyrinth and Fraggle Rock. In 1990, Van Gilder moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she worked first at the Disney Figure Finishing Department, before becoming a Walt Disney Imagineer. In 1996, she took a sabbatical from Disney to work on the TV series Muppets Tonight. Over the past 3 years, she has collaborated with the Flower Pepper Gallery on window designs. Van Gilder graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, and currently lives in Pasadena.
Amy Van Gilder has done numerous memorable special window installations for our gallery! We are truly grateful for Amy’s creativity and talent!

“Amy Van Gilder was one of the earliest designers in the NY Muppet Workshop, hired during the first season of The Muppet Show. She left Henson for a time in the early 1980s to start a family, but returned to work on Muppets Tonight. She also had a cameo alongside Jim Henson in The Great Muppet Caper, as a patron of The Dubonnet Club.

She was later hired by The Walt Disney Company in the Imagineering Department, where she currently helps with integrating the newly acquired Muppets property into their theme parks. Her achievements there include design and theming concepts for Lucky the Dinosaur, the first in a series of free-roving Audio-Animatronics in Disney’s Living Character Initiative, which would later include the Muppet Mobile Labs.

Amy Van Gilder’s children are journalist Sonia van Gilder Cooke and photographer Bartholomew Cooke. Sonia van Gilder Cooke mentioned her mother as her “role model” in an interview with The Sunday Times of London.” – Muppet Wiki